prayer with people.

I love to pray, and I love to pray alone, but tonight, I wish I were praying with others.

I don't know why. I began to pray, and felt the urge to silence, and then...an overwhelming urge to pray with people, with friends, fellow believers.

I think about that--about the actual mechanics of the thing--and become terrified. I can't pray aloud with other people. But I want to. Why do you think that is?

Why do I feel this way? Why is my heart aching a little at the absence of rising prayers around me?

It's an odd sensation.

I've missed this blog this week. It has been a friend to me in confusing times, no less times like tonight--when I feel something I don't understand in a moment of grasping God, and wonder...is this the way that God speaks to me? I begin to pray, and He stills me, and then my heart aches for something. It's a pattern in prayer.

So what could this mean?

Sometimes, in all honesty, new things like this come up, and my first impulse is to quit. I'm scared. I feel I've taken too many steps already in the dark. My base instinct is to run. I get insecure, and overwhelmed, and in that moment almost anything seems like too much. Scripture is too much, and talking is too much, and prayer becomes just a moment spent in posture--resting my forehead to the ground, telling God to take it easy on me.

In a greater sense, I'm not worried. God has brought me this far. He has made known to me all that I know. When I couldn't see what was happening, and when I didn't understand how any of this could make sense, He was guiding it all through to faith.

So the deepest pain in my heart to pray with others is an impulse with a purpose, I trust.

I hope.